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You are here: MacNN Forums > Enthusiast Zone > Networking > Advice/thoughts on my workplace LAN upgrade plans

Advice/thoughts on my workplace LAN upgrade plans
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Cold Warrior
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Jul 4, 2008, 01:27 PM
 
One of my side responsibilities at work is as the sole sysad for a newly-established LAN containing one gigabit router connected to the WAN, a Windows 2003 server with active directory and the associated profile and home space, another server (same OS) devoted to approx 6 TB of files everyone uses, and 40 Dell towers w/ gigabit-capable NICs.

Currently every 4 machines connect to a 100 Mb switch, which then connects to the router. Each port on the router is gigabit, and we're using 10 ports. Every user (maybe 20 logged in at a time) routinely reads files from the data server, and our read speeds are very slow.

I plan on upgrading all switches to gigabit in order to improve read speeds over the network.

Does anyone see any issues with this?
     
ghporter
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Jul 4, 2008, 06:16 PM
 
Standards-complaint network hardware should be so OS and device agnostic as to make no difference as far as the switches goes. Your gigabit router's capacity is going to still be the choke point in this setup. But... I'd make sure that every cable from the router to the switches was high-quality Cat6 just to minimize media issues.

The W2k3 server is almost certainly your current speed issue. The process of virtualizing the profiles and providing the home space for your users is not quite trivial, but it is also rather slow by itself. It's better than running on an NT server, but I don't think they ever got the turtle-factor out of the Server OS. This is not to say that gigabit connectivity within the LAN will be useless. On the contrary. But once you go that route you'll probably see that the dirt path in your information highway belongs to the W2k3 server machine. Good luck with this project.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
seanc
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Jul 4, 2008, 08:38 PM
 
If you're upgrading to gigabit everywhere, make sure you're at least using CAT 5E, preferably CAT 6 for peace of mind, but I'm sure you know that.

Is your file server doing anything else other than host files? Is it running Blackberry Enterprise Server or Exchange? BES will absolutely kill a server, it's such a horrible resource hog. Also make sure AV software isn't scanning during the day.

Also, make sure the Dells can do gigabit, else start buying NICs .
     
Cold Warrior  (op)
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Jul 4, 2008, 08:49 PM
 
Thanks. I checked the NICs and they'll do Gb. The primary file server handles profiles and home folders, no BES or anything else (Exchange is handled by a server off the LAN). The second file server stores large files we access all day. This is the part I'm most concerned about speeding up -- the reads from the second server to workstations.
     
   
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